Cambrian Explosion: afterthought (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 17:54 (4078 days ago) @ David Turell

David and I remain locked in battle over the feasibility of the intelligent, independently inventive cell, which David calls poppycock.-Thank you for your three posts in reply to BBella and to myself. As I said in my last post, I don't have a problem with your rejection of the idea. My problem is the certainty with which you ridicule it, backed up only by your own subjective interpretations. In these three posts you have adopted a more cautious tone, which is very welcome [my bold]:-1) "There is an enormous amount of information in cells which they use, roughly as automatons. There is no thought in these reactions [...] The consciousness, as I see it, is the provided information."
2) "The cells have to dig into their DNA instructions to try a new approach. And it is my theory that the instructions are there, placed pre-planned by God."
3) "If I sat down with Margulis and discussed this I feel she would agree with me."-I appreciate the acknowledgement of subjectivity here, and hope I'm not exhausting your patience by trying for some more concessions! -1) What do you mean by "roughly" automatic? Either the user is an automaton or it isn't. Most of our own activities are based on the enormous amount of information stored in all our cells (especially the brain), but how can consciousness "be" the information? Consciousness is the user of the information. BBella interprets the lecture as a clear indication that cells make decisions and exchange information (which you categorically said did not happen), and this is even clearer in the far more detailed article I quoted on bacillus subtilis, which adds cooperation, diversification and even anticipation and prediction to the list. Thought/consciousness/intelligence can be on different levels. Leaving aside the super-level of self-awareness, how many more attributes do you require for your definition of intelligence? -2) "The cells have to dig in...to try a new approach". What digs and what tries? Yes, it is your theory that the "Construction Planner" is an automaton preprogrammed to find God's instructions and produce his pre-planned goods when conditions are right (though it seems a strange sort of divine preprogramming that requires trying out). Another possibility is that the "Construction Planner" is the unpreprogrammed intelligence of the cell, which in coordination with billions of other unpreprogrammed intelligent CPs is able to find solutions to problems or to exploit new possibilities thrown up by changes to the environment (as organisms show us over and over again in Nature's Wonders). A theory is a theory is a theory.-3) You wrote: "This is information presented in the genome by a conscious intelligence and it makes it seem that the cells themselves are acting consciously." 
Margulis said, after studying the antics of her "conscious bacteria": "The idea that only people are conscious makes me laugh." This suggests that she would not agree with you, and the word "seem" is inappropriate.-You wrote: "We are conscious and can plan intelligently. Our dialysis machines are very poor substitutes for a naturally functioning kidney, and you want some sort of individual cells to plan one? That is why your theory is poppycock." This is a distortion. It is not a matter of a few individual cells saying "Let's make a kidney". We humans have, over just a few thousand years, devised increasingly complex constructions based on the invention of the wheel. One invention leads to another. I'm suggesting that from the original "invention" (the individual cell) have sprung all subsequent "inventions", as a result of zillions of generations of cell communities cooperating and sharing their accumulated knowledge over thousands of millions of years. From our point of view, the culmination of this complexity is probably the community of billions of cells that form the human brain, where the consciousness of cells has reached a level at which they are even conscious of their own consciousness. You might call that the evolution of cellular intelligence.